First Star, Worst Star: January 4th, 2015

Well gang, we did it, we made it to the year 2015. THE FUTURE IS NOW! And what also is now is this weeks First Star, Worst Star.

FIRST STAR

Jaromir Jagr was drafted when I was 4 years old. Jaromir Jagr has accomplished basically everything there is to accomplish in the NHL, save for a Vezina trophy, but he’s still apparently got plenty of time to knock that one off. Jaromir Jagr has become the oldest player in NHL history to ever score a hat trick. Jaromir Jagr is clearly some kind of cyborg who will outlive us all and will continue to score goals well after the earth has been absorbed by the sun and the human race has ceased to exist. God bless Jaromir Jagr.

A couple things of note here:

– Jagr beat Gordie Howe’s record of oldest player to ever score a hat trick by almost a full year. Going by the newly established Gordie Math® my calculations tell me Jagr is on pace to play well into his 90s.

– Unbelievably this was his first hat trick since 2006, so he now has more hat tricks in the last decade than the Oilers have playoff appearances.

– He is now 3 goals away from 5th all-time in NHL scoring, so if you see one of the Gretzky children lurking around Prudential Center in the near future brandishing a steel pipe maybe give Jagr a heads up.

WORST STAR

The blogging community’s year didn’t get off to the greatest start when word came out that Capgeek.com would be ceasing operations immediately due to health issues of founder Matthew Wuest.

Even if your not a “stats geek” you’ve no doubt heard of Capgeek.com. It was the preeminent site for all things salary related in the NHL, and allowed even the most math averse person to understand just how grossly overpaid any given player on any given team was. Capgeek was so influential it eventually forced NHL teams to start reporting contract numbers on their own, something unheard of as recent as 10 years ago.

It sucks that such a great site had to close down, but it’s an even bigger blow that it’s due to health problems from a member of the hockey community. We wish Matthew a quick and full recovery with whatever he’s dealing with.

In the meantime the people over at NHLNumbers.com do great work and it’s a site that will surely fill the void for all your salary cap related online arguments.

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